High Performance Computing Challenges of the 21st Century Goldi Misra C-DAC, India

High Performance Computing Challenges of the 21st Century

Goldi Misra

C-DAC, India

HPC Advisory Council Lugano Workshop 2010

[email protected]@hpcadvisorycouncil.com

Goldi Misra / HPC - Challenges of the 21st Century / March 2010

HPC - Past, Present & Future

• 1941 – 1 Flop/s• 1950 – 1 KFlop/s (103)• 1964 – 1 MFlop/s (106)• 1987 – 1 GFlop/s (109)• 1997 – 1 TFlop/s (1012)• 2008 – 1 PFlop/s (1015)• 2016- 2018 – 1EFlop/s (1018)• And Beyond…


In the 80’s, HPC made an impact by addressing varied problems related to • Astrophysics • Aeronautics• Chemistry• Climate Modelling• Earthquake prediction • Materials

Computer Simulations are essential for • Scientific discovery & for addressing societal challenges• For industry competitiveness

Pace of Innovation is higher so are the Opportunities

HPC: Strategic Area


• Progress in HPC tightly linked to • Hardware + Software + Algorithms

• Complexity increased for• Hardware systems, • Sophistication of software tools, • HPC numerical analysis, algorithms & applications

• Customizable software, HPC ecosystem, (Opensource & Commercial)

• Support for application codes on heterogeneous systems• Storage & Visualization

HPC: Critical Components


• Economic Growth of country highly linked with HPC

• Indispensable solution for• Complex problems in almost all sectors• Traditional science and engineering domains • National science• Public Health • Agriculture • Economic Innovations

• Progress depends on being able to efficiently perform simulations and other research activities in HPC to solve grand challenge problems of the nation.

HPC: National Importance


Sea Change in Chip Design Today

Moore’s law has hit the wall! Reduced to 20% improvement of Processor Performance per year

from 2002(earlier 52%). Hurdles in power dissipation of air cooled chips Memory wall has been hit, unchanged memory latency Little Instruction Level Parallelism left to exploit efficiently. 2, 4, 8, 16 Cores/Chip are Common. 100 Cores chip have already been announced! Thousands of cores chips already at Drawing Board Level!


Moore’s Law Reinterpreted

Number of cores per chip doubles every 2 years, while clock speed decreases (not increases).

Need to deal with systems with millions of concurrent threads Future generation will have billions of threads! Need to be able to easily replace inter-chip parallelism with intra-chip

parallelism Number of threads of execution doubles every 2 year


Countries / Systems

Source: Top500.org


Architecture / Systems

83.4%

16.2%

0.4%

Source: Top500.org


Application Area / Systems

15.6%

9.4%

6.8%6.2%

6 %

4.4%

3.6%3.2%

3.2%2.2%

2%1.8%

1.4%1.4%

4.8%

23.4%

Source: Top500.org


Processor Family / Systems

79.2%

10.4%

8.4%

1.2%0.8%

Source: Top500.org


Interconnect Family / Systems

51.8%

36.2% 7.4%

1.4%1%

2.2%

Source: Top500.org


Operating Systems / Systems

78.2%

4.4%

4%

3.2%2.4%

1.4%1%

1%4.4 %

Source: Top500.org


Segments / Systems

62.4%

18.2%15.8%

1.8%

1%

0.8%

Source: Top500.org


Scientific & Engineering• Computational Fluid Dynamics• Finite Element Methods• Molecular Modelling• Weather Forecasting• Aerodynamics• Structural Engineering• Material Science• Computational Chemistry• Earthquake Engineering• Air quality management• Flood prediction• Fluid / Structural Interaction • Grid enabled Bioinformatics• Multiphase flow Simulation• Climate grid • And much more…

Multi-disciplinary Applications


“Processor is the New Transistor”

Is the software ready to take on challenges brought in by recent advancements in Hardware Technology?

Algorithms, Programming Languages, Compilers, Operating Systems, Architectures…. Libraries…… not ready to supply Thread Level Parallelism, or, Data Parallelism for 100’s of cores per chip.

Alternatives to improvement in Compute are FPGA based Hardware Accelerators & GPUs


Recent Trends Many Cores onto a single die Motivation is energy efficient performance More & More Hybrid Clusters Computational Nodes + Accelerators Computational Nodes + GPUs FPGA: Fixed functions, less flexible best performance/watt GPU: Evolving towards general purpose computing, partially/ fully

programmable RAM: Possibly magnetic RAM, faster Z RAM Closer integration between processor & memory Storage & Parallel File Systems Interconnects improvements Infiniband/ Optical/ Silicon photonics etc


Today’s Multi Cores

Sun Niagra2 (8 cores) IBM Power 7 (8 cores) IBM Cell (9 cores) Intel Nehalam (4 cores) Fujitsu Venus (8 cores) AMD Istanbul (6 cores) Nvidia Quadro FX 5800 (240 cores) ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 (3200 cores) Larrabee (?)


Challenges


Challenges: Technological Front Performance (Computational & IO) Parallelism: How to Scale to 1,00,000 ways Interconnects Effective Resource Utilization Heterogeneity Application Portability and durability Application check pointing/ restart /migration Scalability Power

• Green Components- Processors/Disks/Power supplies / Fans• Avoid several voltage conversions/ Power efficient UPS

Cooling• Power efficient Chillers, using outside air cooling doors

Limit impact of failure to a subset of the system Reliable components, Preventive maintenance and monitoring Redundancy and Failover


Other Challenges

Training and education Efficient support and maintenance team Total Cost of Ownership ROI Floor Space Administration & Security Downtime (Planned / Unplanned)


Elucidation

Lately Asia Pacific region, one of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets in HPC

HPC users are demanding more of compute power & data storage

Organizations are heading towards a wider and more mainstream adoption of HPC

HPC becoming more economical due to high usage of commodity components.

Goldi Misra / HPC Challenges of the 21st Century / March 2010

Conclusion . . .

• Hardware Lifecycle changing every 6 months• Urgent need for investment in

application/algorithm development• ROI of software development far better than

Hardware Development• Ground level hardware development skills to

be explored• Bringing less explored areas into mainstream

HPC• Making the best out of GPUs and other

paradigms of HPC

Thank You

Documents

High Performance Computing Challenges of the 21st Century Goldi Misra C-DAC, India